The recent wave of terrorist attacks has increased the attention paid to money laundering activities. Using several methodologies, this paper investigates empirically the determinants of money laundering and its regulation in over 80 countries by assembling a cross-country dataset on proxies for...

In this paper we aim to trace the roots of the ongoing economic mayhem and to unmask the chorus of the tragedy which plays on the world stage. The main thesis of our work is that, despite the triumphant rhetoric praising the merits of perfect competition, the global fields of the dysfunctional...

In this paper, a Bayesian approach is suggested to compare unit root models with stationary models when both the level and the error variance are subject to structural changes (known as breaks) of an unknown date. The paper utilizes analytic and Monte Carlo integration techniques for calculating...

A regime switching model in continuous time is introduced where a variety of jumps are allowed in addition to the diffusive component. The characteristic function of the process is derived in closed form, and is subsequently employed to create the likelihood function. In addition, standard...

Foreign currency denominated debt as an influence of exchange rate pressure during the 2008 global crisis is explored across 58 countries. Countries with higher ratios of foreign currency denominated debt to total international debt experienced significant currency depreciation during the global...

We recently experienced a global financial crisis so severe that only massive rescue operations by governments around the world prevented a total financial market meltdown and perhaps another global Great Depression. One necessary precondition for the crisis was the perverse, bonus-driven...

The paper offers an alternative approach to analyzing stock market time series data. The purpose is to develop descriptive, more intuitive, and closer to reality analogs of the behavior of US stock market prices, as indexed by the S&P500 stock price index covering the period October 2003 to...

We introduce human traders into an agent based financial market simulation prone to bubbles and crashes. We find that human traders earn lower profits overall than do the simulated agents (robots) but earn higher profits in the most crash-intensive periods. Inexperienced human traders tend to...

Stock market integration of mainland China is analyzed before and after the liberalization of Chinese stock exchange segments. We apply a causalityin-variance procedure, using four mainland China stock market indices, two indices of the stock exchange in Hong Kong and the Dow Jones Industrial...

The purpose of this paper is to explain why some markets for financialproducts take off while others vanish as soon as they have emerged ...